Shipping Container Dimensions Chart

Click any container name for its full page with internal dimensions in feet-and-inches, door openings, tare weights and FAQ.

Each container has three sets of dimensions, and mixing them up is the most common ordering error. External dimensions are the ISO envelope — what matters for the ship slot, the truck chassis, the crane spreader and the space on your site. Internal dimensions are what your cargo actually gets. Door opening is smaller again, and it is the door — not the internal cross-section — that decides whether a machine or crate gets in at all.

The gaps are structural, not rounding. A standard dry box loses ~160 mm of length to the door assembly and end frame (6.058 m external → 5.898 m internal on a 20 ft), ~86 mm of width to the corrugated side walls (2.438 → 2.352 m) and ~198 mm of height to the floor (28 mm plywood on steel cross-members) and roof (2.591 → 2.393 m). The door opening shrinks further to 2.340 × 2.280 m. Reefers lose far more — insulation takes the 40 ft HC reefer down to 2.290 m of width and 11.583 m of length. Full door data: container door dimensions.

ISO 668 fixes the external envelope: every ISO container is 2,438 mm (8 ft) wide, 2,591 mm (8′6″) or 2,896 mm (9′6″) tall, and 2,991 / 6,058 / 12,192 / 13,716 mm long for the 10 / 20 / 40 / 45 ft sizes. The 40 ft is deliberately not 2 × 20 ft — it is 76 mm longer than two twenties, the gap that lets two 20 ft boxes sit in one 40 ft ship slot with clearance between their corner castings.

The standard allows manufacturing tolerance in the minus direction only: typically −10 mm on length, −4 mm on width and −5 mm on height for a 40 ft unit. No container may exceed the nominal envelope, which is why 60-year-old boxes and 2026-built boxes stack on each other worldwide. Internal dimensions are not standardised — ISO 1496 sets only minimums, so a given 40 ft may be a few millimetres roomier than the 12.032 × 2.352 × 2.393 m in the chart. The details, including the 48/53 ft domestic exceptions, are in the ISO standards guide.

Three weights describe every container. Tare is the empty box: 2,230 kg for a typical 20 ft, 3,740 kg for a 40 ft, 3,900 kg for a 40 ft HC. Max gross is the rating stamped on the CSC plate — 30,480 kg for standard dry boxes, 32,500 kg for most modern high cubes. Payload is the subtraction: max gross minus tare, so 28,250 kg for the 20 ft and 26,740 kg for the 40 ft. Yes, the shorter box legally carries more — same rating, ~1.5 t less steel.

The chart’s tare figures are typical, not universal: manufacturer, floor type and build year move them a few hundred kilograms either way. The CSC plate riveted to the left door of each specific unit is always authoritative, and road limits usually bind long before the container rating does — a fully loaded 20 ft at 30.4 t gross is over the legal truck weight almost everywhere. The full weight breakdown by size is in the container weight guide.

Every length in the chart comes in up to two heights. General purpose (GP, “standard”) is 2,591 mm (8′6″) external; high cube (HC) is 2,896 mm (9′6″) — exactly 305 mm (1 ft) taller, all of it usable: 2,393 vs 2,698 m internal. Footprint, width and door width are identical; the HC door opening is 2,585 mm tall versus 2,280 mm.

The extra foot buys 8.7 m³ on a 40 ft (67.7 → 76.4 m³) at near-identical cost, which is why the 40 ft HC now dominates new production and the standard-height 40 ft is becoming a legacy size. All 45 ft and US domestic 48/53 ft units are high-cube height by default. Spot an HC from the ISO size code on the door: “45G1” is a 40 ft HC, “42G1” a standard 40 ft.

A number the size charts on most sites skip: ISO containers are rated for stacking nine high. Each corner post is tested to carry 86,400 kg of superimposed load — the weight of eight fully loaded 30,480 kg containers above it (with the 1.8× safety factor of the ISO 1496 test rig applied at 213,360 kg per post pair). Every gram of that load passes through the four corner castings; the corrugated walls and roof carry effectively none of it.

Two practical consequences. On land, never stack containers offset or support them mid-span — corner casting on corner casting only, which is also why foundations need bearing only at the four corners. And a roof rated to hold eight loaded containers via its posts will still dent under a point load: the roof sheet itself is ~2 mm steel rated for 300 kg over a 600 × 300 mm area — walk on the cross-member lines, not the panel centres.

The lower rows of the chart reuse the standard envelopes with different structures, and each trades something for its speciality. The reefer spends interior on insulation and machinery: a 40 ft HC reefer offers 67.3 m³ against the dry HC’s 76.4, is 2.290 m wide instead of 2.352, and its 34,000 kg max gross still yields a strong 29,520 kg payload. The open top gives up ~45 mm of internal height to the removable tarpaulin bows but accepts crane loading from above. The flat rack abandons walls entirely and compensates with structure — the 40 ft version is rated to 45,000 kg max gross, carrying 39,520 kg of machinery or steel on a reinforced floor. The tank is a 25,000 L vessel in a 20 ft frame at 36,000 kg gross.

Rule of thumb when scanning those rows: special types buy capability with either volume (reefer, open top) or universality (flat rack and tank need special handling and stowage), and their tares run 10–50% above the dry box of the same length. If cargo fits a dry container, a dry container is always the cheapest slot. The full breakdown by type, with capability matrix, is in types of shipping containers.

Container specs mix unit systems freely — ISO defines them in millimetres, the trade talks feet, US buyers think in pounds — and casual rounding creates real errors. The safe conversions: lengths at 1 in = 25.4 mm exactly, so the 2,438 mm width is 96 in (8 ft 0 in) on the nose, and the 2,352 mm internal width is 92.6 in — call it 7 ft 8 in, never “nearly 8 ft”. Weights at 1 kg = 2.2046 lb: the 30,480 kg max gross is exactly 67,200 lb, and the 20 ft’s 28,250 kg payload is 62,280 lb. Volume at 1 m³ = 35.31 ft³: 33.2 m³ → 1,172 ft³; 67.7 m³ → 2,390 ft³.

When a spec sheet disagrees with this chart by an inch or two, check which direction it rounded — marketing pages habitually round internal dimensions up. Cargo planning should round down; a crate cut to “7 ft 9 in because the container is 8 ft wide” will not load.

Hit print on this page and the chart comes out clean: navigation, footer and FAQ are stripped by the print stylesheet and the table is sized to a single A4/Letter sheet in landscape-friendly columns. Useful taped inside a warehouse office or a survey clipboard.

If you need numbers the chart intentionally leaves out — feet-and-inch internals, door openings per size, cubic feet — each container name links to its full page, and the condition side of a purchase decision (one-trip vs cargo-worthy vs WWT) lives in the grades guide with market pricing in the prices guide.